Two Poems

Tom Snarsky

Song

for Kristi

The French Inhaler

Kurt Gödel saw the rise of fascism and then became interested in the transmigration of souls. In his famous incompleteness results, published just a few years before the Fatherland Front became the only legally permitted party in his home country of Austria, Gödel formulated & proved the notion that any sufficiently “powerful” formal language — an attempt to translate mathematics into the manipulation of abstract symbols, doable by pure mechanistic calculation, as by a modern computer — will always leave out some truths that are recognizable as true from “outside” the formal language itself. (He accomplished this, in part, through a sort of mirror-trick wherein numbers could be taken to stand, not only for themselves, but also via an encoding scheme for statements of arithmetic — that is, a number could be an element of a system while also “saying” something meaningful about that very system.) In other words, an outside observer could see that there was at least one missing theorem — could really know it to be true — but someone “trapped” in the language would not be able to demonstrate it, by construction. Gödel left Austria for Princeton in 1940 (he’d been there before, but this time he went for good) and had to take the long way around because of the British blockade, traveling trans-Siberianly and then across the Pacific and then across the continental United States. He famously almost failed his citizenship exam because he told the judge about a contradiction he had found in the U.S. Constitution that, if exploited, would allow the country to devolve into a dictatorship. He never managed, at Princeton, to do work as “important” as his accomplishments in logic in Europe in the ’20s and ’30s, but he got interested in other philosophical topics, like ontological proofs for the existence of god and arguments for there being a form of life after death. His hypochondria, which began with a childhood case of rheumatic fever that left him convinced he suffered from a lifelong heart defect as a consequence of his illness, worsened. He was taken care of by others and especially by his wife, Adele, of whom his family had strongly disapproved (she was a ballet dancer) and who eventually went so far as to taste his food for him, since he had a paranoid fear of being poisoned. It got to the point where he refused to eat without Adele (although he would not let her cook for him, only taste). Gödel’s life was not a morality play; he was a real person, you & I are real people, we can’t read his history as a parable any more than we could look at our own days that way. He did die convinced, though, that god was real and that human souls would certainly be reincarnated — that we’d get to fulfill our full potential in another life, especially if we hadn’t gotten to realize it in this one. His grave is very simple, with a small tombstone that bears the design of a book into which are carved his name and Adele’s. People leave visiting stones on top of the marker. These calculi, whether they mean to or not, make a number, which could be taken to mean something but which is also subject to change any time another logician, mathematician, philosopher, poet, or other pilgrim makes a new deposit of care. While I was there I saw a bird knock one off, probably by accident, just looking for a place to land.